BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

Not long after the landscape went in, the farm began encroaching. The black-eyed Susans were replaced by herbs. The shining sumac and Indiangrass were dug up to make way for chickens. And a copse of Skyrocket oaks, which screened the residential building’s parking lot from a traffic-choked section of Chicago’s Ogden Avenue, was next on the chopping block.

Mimi McKay, ASLA, the landscape architect for the project, known as Harvest Commons, got a call from Dave Snyder, the staff gardener. “Dave said that he was gonna build a chicken run and that he was gonna remove the oak trees to do it, and I had an absolute cow,” McKay recalls. “I said, ‘You absolutely cannot remove them—and you don’t have to remove them.’”